Fortification for transportation

In response to my (now six-month-old) post, "The Place of Sherry": I was reading the transcript and notes for Acquerello Italiano, a useful and often interesting audio magazine for students of Italian. In an article about Marsala wine, the notes point out that John Woodhouse, a Liverpudlian, developed the fortification "recipe" for Marsala after having done the same for Port.

As far as I know, all of the great fortified wines - Spain's Sherry, Italy's Marsala, and Portugal's Port and Madeira - were developed by and for the English. And of course they had to ship the stuff back to England or one of its colonies for consumption by Englishmen. It being the 18th century, there weren't a lot of refrigerated container ships tied to the docks of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Porto, or Marsala. So they shipped wine on sun-beaten, wave-tossed sailing ships. Heat and vibration are two of the major enemies of wine, so one can imagine that at least some of the barrels that arrived in London would contain wine that was in pretty sad shape. But add fortification with a little bit of neutral brandy (i.e., distilled wine), and what do you get? A sturdier wine that resists the rigors of shipping better (the additional alcohol makes the wine more tolerant of heat and vibration), a wine that ages tremendously well (because of the same sturdiness), and Englishmen who get drunk more quickly (higher-alcohol hooch!).

(You also often get a sweet wine, because alcohol added before fermentation is complete kills the yeast and thus leaves some unfermented sugar in the wine. But of course Fino-style Sherry is fortified and dry, so sweetness is not a necessary outcome of fortification. I add this caveat in order to avoid fortifying the prejudices of the "ooh, I don't like Sherry; it's sweeeet!" set. Not that sweetness per se is a bad thing in wine, but all of these digressions are fodder for another post.)

Anyway, if fortification came about as a way to protect wine during hot, heaving sea voyages, then it isn't as surprising that Sherry isn't a particularly apt beverage for an August afternoon in Jerez de la Frontera. But in foggy, frigid London - or the frequently foggy, frigid summer in the San Francisco Bay Area - what could be better?